Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) is an open, non-proprietary standard for mobile telecommunication. GSM is a digital mobile telephone system that is widely used in over 200 countries. It uses a variation of time division multiple access (TDMA) and is the most widely used of the three digital wireless telephone technologies, TDMA, GSM, and code division multiple access (CDMA). GSM digitizes and compresses data, then transmits it in a channel along with other streams of user data, each in its own time slot. It operates in the 850 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz and 1900 MHz frequency bands.
One of GSM's strengths is its international roaming capability. This feature provides consumers seamless and standardised same number availability in more than 200 countries. As a result, it is estimated that more than one billion people use GSM phones as of 2005, making GSM the dominant mobile phone system worldwide with a majority of the world's cellular telecommunication market.
General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) is a mobile data service available to users of GSM mobile telephones. GPRS is a packet-switched communication protocol, which means that multiple users can share the same transmitting or receiving channel, only communicating when necessary. Accordingly, the total available bandwidth can be immediately dedicated to those users who are actually transmitting and/or receiving data at any given moment.
With the proliferation of wireless telecommunication devices such as web-enabled cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and the like, more and more people want to be able to communicate in ways other than the traditional cellular voice telephone call. Accordingly, devices that provide access to Internet browsing, electronic mail (e-mail) communication and instant messaging are gaining in popularity. These added features are examples of mobile data services that require intermittent data transfers, and benefit from sharing the available bandwidth, as provided by GPRS.
However, as people begin to use the additional features provided by their wireless communication devices in addition to voice communication, they will likely see an increase in power consumption, as the devices are being used more frequently. As such, the devices may have to be recharged more frequently. Further, recent trends have been to reduce the overall size of these communication devices. This desire contrasts with the increase in power required by the devices, which will likely require a larger battery to compensate for increased use.
Accordingly, it can be seen that there is a need for a system and method that enables the wireless device to reduce battery consumption.